1997 was the year that Michael Dell gave the advice that Apple should close up shop and return the money to the shareholders.
As a company and brand, Apple was in bad shape: Windows 95 was a huge success and Windows NT was growing in the enterprise while NeXT had faltered.
Jobs really didn't have a lot in the product pipeline (the first iMac didn't come out until a year later), so the campaign needed to make employees and customers believe again in Apple.
Four years from this speech the iPod was released and OSX started to show up on desktops. It took eight years before Apple went to Intel processors.
And it took ten years of incremental improvement, discipline, product focus, and risk-taking before we got to the iPhone.
As a company and brand, Apple was in bad shape: Windows 95 was a huge success and Windows NT was growing in the enterprise while NeXT had faltered.
Jobs really didn't have a lot in the product pipeline (the first iMac didn't come out until a year later), so the campaign needed to make employees and customers believe again in Apple.
Four years from this speech the iPod was released and OSX started to show up on desktops. It took eight years before Apple went to Intel processors.
And it took ten years of incremental improvement, discipline, product focus, and risk-taking before we got to the iPhone.